Have you ever seen a ghost?

[BCBG]

Serious question - have you ever seen a ghost? If so, why are you certain about what you saw? Could it have been a natural phenomenon? I ask because something I saw is preying on my mind. I was driving through a village on the East Sussex border one afternoon last year, thinking of God knows what, radio on, when all of a sudden the car filled with the smell of fuel (which makes me feel ill ). I then realised a plane was flying very low left to right across the road, so low that I thought it would crash. I couldn't see any markings on the plane but I remember the shape very clearly. I don't remember whether or not there was any noise, but I was so shocked I brought the car to a standstill and looked back across the road. I realised that to my right the land fell away very sharply, so it would have been possible for a plane to fly over me and then clear the trees heading off over the valley (i think) except that I couldn't see any plane. I honestly stood there and listened for an impact. I could still smell this incredible odour of aviation fuel (like when you are crossing the tarmac sometimes on a small airport and the wind catches you, only much stronger). Never thought about ghosts before, but I still wonder what exactly I saw that day.

ABT, I don't understand the point of your post. Are you saying that MNetters telling ghost stories made your 15yo patient sick/worse?

BTW, I too work in MH and it is challenging and dangerous regardless of religious/spiritual beliefs or lack thereof in a patient/client.

I do think this has turned into an interesting debate.

As I said previously, I am a generally rational person who is very skeptical when hearing ghost stories.

I do accept that quite sensible people do sometimes believe they have experienced something woo. However I find these people's thought processes quite interesting. In many examples, it is pretty easy to explain what probably happened in a logical manner, for other instances as a skeptic I am quite happy just to think that was odd and just let it go. However, for some people it seems that they need an explanation for every event that happens rather than just accepting its oddness, so they use a supernatural explanation. This seems a fundamental difference in the two ways believers/non-believers behave.

I can witness this in myself sometimes. When at home normally our house makes all sorts of creaks and noises during the day and night, the fridge moans, things settle in the bin, the cat knocks something and so on. When I am home alone at night or I have just read a woo thread even as a rational skeptic the noises feel very different, my senses become more alert and I can feel a bit spooked sometimes. The noises haven't changed, but my inner thoughts of how I perceive them have changed.

I do think that all humans have an innate tendency to look for meaning and a spiritual belief system. It is part of what makes us human, allows us to love others, appreciate the arts, and for some experience religion. It has been important to us in our development and advancement as a species. However we also need to be cautious about some of these innate aspects of ourselves, particularly when they can be damaging to others, our power for logical and rational thought needs to used to balance the more harmful aspects of this trait. Which I guess is what this debate is about.

"And as I've said before on this thread, if someone posted a thread saying 'help me, my son is possessed' every response would say no, he isn't. There is a rational explanation, you and your family need help and support"

Actually, there was a thread where a woman talked about her daughter seeing spirits, and anyone who suggested that there may be something else going on was shouted down by the paranormal people. It was incredibly alarming.

Dione - the point is that it's all part of the same issue. Believing in things which aren't real which have other rational explanations.

And we can't say 'your son isn't possessed, that's nonsense' because demons don't exist but at the same time say 'I saw a ghost though, that's possible...you just never know'.

It's either all not real or all possibly real. And I don't think anyone on here would say it's possible a person is possessed by an evil spirit. But it IS possible that kind/harmless spirits are wandering about giving people a sense of temperature change or playing around with electrics.

If you believe in the latter possibility it makes no sense that you wouldn't believe in the first malevolent possibility.

That's why it can be harmful.

Bertrand - when I was 3 I came downstairs to my parents after being asleep for a few hours. I was crying and saying 'the grey lady won't let me sleep, she keeps crying and shaking my bed'. My parents were young and shit themselves!. I had a dream or saw or heard something on TV that prompted that. I know that. Kids say weird stuff.

And belief in spirits doesn't have to have such damaging effects as implying that demons or evil spirits exist too. It can be more benign but possibly more upsetting.

My Mum is very 'woo'. Has said since her Mum's death that she smells her perfume, my Nan sends 'signs' and sometimes touches her.

It's a comfort for her I know. And I would never agree with her but I don't challenge her as I know how distressing it would be for her.

So you'd think it's harmless except my Mum has six siblings. A couple nod and don't care as think it's bollocks but the others are open to 'woo' and get really upset.

Why doesn't Mum visit me? I'd love a sign or a touch, I've prayed for it at times but nothing. .why would she pick one child and ignore the others that loved and miss her just as much?. Is she angry? Did we do something to upset her or make her stay away?.

ABT- the thread I'm talking about was not harmless. Not harmless at all.

Oh no Bertrand - I'm agreeing with you. It is not harmless AT ALL!

Bertrand I actually do agree with the point you are making.

However the argument can equally apply to other aspects of our beliefs. Religious values and morals can be a force for much good in the world, but they have and do cause a lot of suffering.

Bad science and poor rational thought can sometimes be applied in the same way too. Eugenics, capitalist economics without compassion, or trialling drugs that have harmful side affects. That doesn't necessarily mean all science is bad.

in first school i went to the cloakroom at breaktime (which we shouldn't do) saw a lady cleaning the heating pipes (victorian school no radiators) as i looked she vanished

i ran outside and didn't break that school rule again

Chokbik - with regards to you seeing a light moving though the window, do you know about ball lightening? I saw it when I was 7 and it really freaked me out and it's only recently I've discovered what it was. Really interesting.

New understandings are constantly arising and things that were taught as fact in schools less than a hundred years ago are being overturned by new discoveries.

Can you cite something that was taught as fact less than a 100 years ago which has now been overturned? Let's start from there.

ABT, a glass of wine with dinner is all part of an alcohol issue that is an expensive problem for this country. You seem to be suggesting that belief in afterlife causes MH problems and that is not the case.

I was on the end of one of the most staggeringly ignorant and arrogant posts I have ever seen on MN. The poster (a Dawkins Atheist) proposed my that my ExH's psychosis was easier to deal with than a believer's because, being an atheist he would realise that he was unwell and not attributed it to a possession.

Dione sorry can you be more explicit in the point you're making?

it was incredibly alarming

What was telling was that not long prior to that thread a Christian had posted suggesting she was possessed and no one agreed with her, not one poster.

Every poster refuted her belief, no one complained that her belief wasn't being accepted.

A friend of mine truly believes that a relative of hers is possessed having been cursed. The friend is of another culture to me.
The relative in question is a (now) teenage girl who was 'normal' until aged 6. Somehow, someone put a 'curse' on the child. Since then the child has spells of being vacant, is violent, has seizures, growls, behaves manically.
I do not know what the direct family are doing as I am not in close or regular contact with my friend, and the people concerned live overseas.

There are parallels in behaviour between this child and the sibling of a friend of mine who became ill in their teens. The sibling has epilipsy and a number of medical conditions which have combined and resulted in periods of catatonia. Oxygen starvation has caused irreversable brain damage. I'm not in full possession of the facts as this is something my friend finds hard to talk about. However, this friend does not believe their sibling is possessed.

Believing in demonic possession isn't the norm amongst Christians and as horrendous as it is you can understand why those who do, do, because jesus clearly did so most christians thankfully allegorise those parts of the NT.

Alan friend who believes in possession is not Christian. I can understand how people used to think that, before we had as much knowledge as we do about medicine.

One key thing in all of the topics discussed here is that our capacity for knowledge/discovery cannot be finite. Several hundred years ago the sound of an owl calling in the night would be attributed to a ghost; seeing a white shape flittering around in the twilight making a horrible noise could only be something demonic by (the majority of) cultural definition.

Time slips interest me. Not something I have experience of, but given that we can show that time is relative to various other factors, it does beg the question whether there will be future knowledge that may provide an explanation for this apparent phenomena.

Alan, I thought I was quite specific in the point I was making: "You seem to be making the point that belief in afterlife causes MH problems and that is not the case."

Alan
Can you cite something that was taught as fact less than a 100 years ago which has now been overturned? Let's start from there.

"There are 8 planets in the solar system."

"Women, due to the stresses of modern life on their frail sex, develop faulty wombs; this is called hysteria."

And of course not forgetting:
"The world came into being through Divine Creation and the theory of evolution is a filthy damned lie."
It was only 90 years ago that John Scopes was prosecuted, and found guilty, for teaching evolution.

"In fact statistically speaking any time slip is more likely to reveal a dinosaur than a homosapien seeing as dinosaurs existed for 160 million years whereas humans have only been walking on earth for a mere snip of that, at a feeble 200,000 years."
It's easier to see something close than it is to see something far away, and if that's true for physical distance then is there any reason to think that it might not also be true for time? It's also possible, although slightly less sensible, that humans are somehow more likely/able to see humans due to some chemical or electrical function of the brain.

Assuming that time slips are possible at all, of course.

Lets be scientific about this.

The experimental evidence is this:

People report having seen images/shadows or heard noises relating to people or objects that either could not by probable convention have been there or disappeared in a manor not associated with such people or objects.

Possible explanations:

1. The person seen/heard really was there however unlikely that might have been perceived to be.

Supporting evidence: People are sometimes in your garden when they shouldn't be. Or even walking in your bedroom. Sometimes they leave surprisingly quickly while you were distracted. Images that look like people can be generated by random reflection, diffraction or mirage. The human brain is trained to see people even when they aren't there as any number of pictures of random noise in which people can 'see' faces will attest too.

1. People are lying.

Supporting evidence: People lie about all sorts of things all the time for all sorts of reasons. There is no particular reason to discount lying as an explanation for a ghost story unless you were the person who experienced it.

1. The phenomenon they heard or saw was not objectively real but experienced due to the complexity of the human brain and senses.

Supporting evidence: The human brain is very complex and poorly understood. Hallucinations happen. Dreaming happens. Disorders in which people become unable to tell real from imagined events exist. Memory is massively susceptible both to loss of information and to rewriting by suggestion repeated rehashing or by the normal processes used by your brain to compensate for varying speeds of information flow (yep everyone's brain lies to them constantly about what they are sensing in order to back calculate when something most likely happened even though the information arrived later...). A screw up by any of these systems as a one off or as part of a known but undiagnosed brain condition could easily explain any ghost experience.

1. Time slips.

Supporting evidence: None that I am aware of. As far as I know there is no data to suggest such a thing has ever happened.

1. Ghosts exist.

Supporting evidence: Again, none that I am aware of. We have never been able to convincing rule out all the existing possibilities in order to leave this as the only remaining one.

To be honest the big problem with ghost hunting is number 3 on this list. Until someone sees an impossible person while having their brain scanned, said scan indicating their visual systems operating normally and so actually seeing what cannot be there, we aren't going to be able to rule out brain fart as an explanation for seeing a ghost.

Had a similar experience while walking a promanard a huge boat with lights appeared in front of us for a few seconds we both stopped in our tracks it was gone as soon as it had appeared took a while for both of us to admit to what we had seen to each other but we both saw the same boat. There was shallow water and a path where it appeared . Also I saw a ghost while abroad it was 7 ft plus tall with a turban this was very scary slept on the balcony for the following two nights ??